"A suit isn't a space suit—although it can serve as one. It is not primarily armor—although the Knights of the Round Table were not armored as well as we are... A suit is not a ship but it can fly, a little—on the other hand neither spaceships nor atmosphere craft can fight against a man in a suit except by saturation bombing of the area he is in."

It can be sleek and graceful or big, bulky and intimidating, but when you wear it you can wreak havoc on the battlefield. Powered Armor typically amplifies the movements of its wearer, adding its strength to theirs in a sort of purely mechanical Synchronization. As the page quote says, they also tend to be a self-contained environment, allowing the user to exist comfortably in space, underwater, or in other areas that would kill unprotected humans, like a Hazmat Suit. They can often fly, at least for short distances or via rocket-assisted jumps. If this gives them good mobility and speed then the users often join the Lightning Bruiser camp. And most importantly and as the name implies, the amplified sturdiness and strength allows the wearer to don thick slabs of armor rendering them at least highly resistant to small arms with little encumbrance or exertion.

In event of its failure to protect them, or other medical emergencies, many can retrieve the wearer to base for treatment. Some are capable of acting as Animated Armor.

While there are massive engineering challenges involved in solving such a suit's power supply and logistic requirements, as well as making it versatile and durable enough to participate in actual combat, powered armor is conceptually plausible. Unlike Humongous Mecha, it could actually be useful, especially in urban battles where tanks (or four-story robots) would be limited in movement. There's also a number of different civilian uses for a suit that makes you strong enough to lift a car. The US military and many civilian R&D departments are currently conducting experiments with powered exoskeletons, perhaps making this a future Truth in Television.

The Tekkamen from Tekkaman Blade appear to wear powered armor, but in fact become metallic life forms when they transform. However, the Sol Tekkaman units ("Teknosuits" in Teknoman) are actual powered armors.

Macross Frontier gave us the debut of the EX-Gear, a powered armour/exoskeleton suit (with built-in Jet Pack and provision for a BFG) for use by Variable Fighter pilots. It's not as well armored as most of the other examples (the waist, upper arms, and thighs are somewhat exposed, as poor Michel found out...), but that's because its main function is to serve as a linkup/ejection system for the new line of VFs.

Frontier also gave us the one-off "Armored Klan": Klan Klan was unable to get to her powered armor suit to repel a Vajra attack, so, being a Zentradi, she improvised by strapping on equipment designed for Valkyries in order to fight.

B-Ko from Project A-ko breaks out a Stripperific mockery of one for her showdown with A-Ko... at least it would be a mockery if it did not enable her to fight a running battle with the Humongous Mecha-wrecking titular lead.

Bonta-Kun in Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu is a Theme Park mascot converted into the cutest miniature death machine since Metal Slug by Sousuke Sagara. Oddly enough, he marketed it to various police forces around the world, with limited success. Even more oddly, it appears to be based on Sharp X68000 hardware.

The Ranma ˝ manga presents Do-chan (for dogi, a martial arts uniform, plus an affectionate suffix.) It is an ancient, sentient (and utterly perverted) suit of armor that looks like a puffy Chinese blouse, black leggings, and a yin-yang belt. It can move around independently, has limited senses (sight, hearing, and touch, at least) and can fight to defend itself. It will only accept a female owner, but those who wear it will find that their speed, power, and agility have been increased to match their own ultimate potential. Thus, when Akane wears it, she can punch enormous craters into asphalt, leap over buildings, and generally outclass Ranma to the point of utter humiliation.

A more straight-up example is the Battle Armor which Gosunkugi purchased off a mail-order ad. It promises amazing strength and incredible combat skills for defeating one's foes... and it certainly delivers, except that it locks into place as soon as you put it on and only activates when said foe comes along. And then, you have a very limited time to defeat him before the suit self-destructs.

One of the more bizarre powered armors comes from Kemeko Deluxe!. The titular Kemeko is a Super-Deformed, borderline Gonk-ish power suit that nonetheless provides its wearer, MM, with enhanced battle capabilities. MM herself wears a Latex Space Suit and has to have some form of hammerspace inside that thing - she's bigger than it is.

Gantz gives the hunters particularly hypertech powered armour that provides superstrength, Roof Hopping jumping powers and apparently some kind of forcefield. In typical Gantz style the big black ball doesn't bother telling anybody these facts, or that the suits' protection does not extend to swords or lasers.

As seen in the Osaka and Italy arcs, there is a bigger, tougher Gantz armor that's supposed to be superior to the regular suits. It's not sure if it can really hold up considering all of the users seen thus far are dead.

The Gold Cloths in Saint Seiya certainly qualify. Although Bronze and Silver Cloths, as well as rival gods' distinctive suits of armor, can protect the wearer to a supernatural degree, the Zodiac-based Cloths of Athena's Gold Saints provide notable increases in strength, speed, and defensive power, far beyond any other Cloth, Scale, or Surplice. They can even survive absolute zero and being hit with earth-shattering attacks.

Also, the anime presented a three-man squad called the Steel Saints, created by the Kido Foundation as assistants to the heroic Bronze Saints. Their "Cloths" are mechanical and crammed with gadgets that can emulate a Saint's supernatural abilities. They were Put on a Bus as soon as they could...

In GaoGaiGar, Cyborg Guy has a suit of "Ultimate Armor". He graduates to "ID Armor" when he becomes an Evoluder. It's not clear whether the armor is enhancing his natural strength and speed, enabling it, or is just there to look cool. That said, the ID armor has one important part in it (the GaoBrace and Will Knife), and Evoluder Guy probably at least needs the ID Armor to pilot GaoFar and GaoFighGar.

The Figures in Figure 17 Tsubasa & Hikaru are a kind of sentient powered armor, and Hikaru is an accientally-created Artificial Human derived from a broken Figure, who can still revert to Figure form when necessary. The aliens D.D. and Oldina also use Figures to fight.

Guyver: Bio-Boosted Armour, a manga from the late 80's, along with a one shot OVA from '86, a twelve part mini-series released by studio L.A. Heroes released from 89 to about 92-93 and also a twenty six episode series that expanded more on the manga than the twelve episode one, that was released in 2005 by FUNimation Studios. This series uses this concept to its fullest extent. It starts out with a high schooler named Sho Fukamachi walking in the woods near the school with his friend Tetsuro Segawa. There they hear and see the aftermath of a huge explosion and see something hurdling through the sky towards them. Sho picks it up to and points out that it's alien looking, when he all of sudden trips and smacks his face against it and it starts to encompass him. Later when Tetsuro is in immediate danger from a secret world government style organization known as Chronos, Sho clad in this "bio" metal armor then destroys the ones troubling Tetsuro. Afterward he seemingly regains consciousness while still in the armor and notes that it is DEFINITELY alien.

A downside of the armor is that they can't be permanently separated from their recognized user without the Remover. The user can "dequip" the armor at will when not needed and it's been demonstrated that a sufficient electrical jolt to the control metal can cause the armor to spontaneously dequip.The Removers have to be bonded to someone and though they don't kill the host, they do leave them naked and powerless in front of someone who wanted to strip their armor from them, probably a bad guy.

Appleseed has two classes of Powered Armor: "Protectors", which are fairly standard suits; and "Landmates", which border on being Mini-Mecha and suspend the wearer in the torso of the armor. The Landmates' main outer "Slave Arms" follow the movements of the arms of the pilot, placed in smaller, form-fitting armored gauntlets which dangle outside the main body.

One interesting variation in Pokémon Special is what Koga wears during the Silph Co. siege. His armor is made out of his Pokemon. His Muk forms a shoulder and chest plate while his Golbat rests on his arm for a tonfa-like weapon. His other arm has an Ekans wrapped around it.

Mewtwo's armor in Pokémon: The First Movie is a partial aversion in that its only power is to weaken Mewtwo's power to a level where he can safely battle without slaughtering his opponent as well as keep him under control.

From Naruto, Akatsuki member Sasori is the prime example, hiding himself in a mobile and heavily armed puppet, we also have a version of this of the spiritual version in the form of Susano'o, which Sasuke Uchiha and Itachi Uchiha use.

In its higher forms, Sasuke and Itachi's Susano'o falls more into Mini-Mecha in their size and power. Same with Madara's in its 'complete' (full skin form) but it turns into a Humongous Mecha in his 'Perfect' Form.

Similar to the Toph example below, Risho of YuYu Hakusho used earth to cover himself for battle, although it's not clear if it actually powered him or just lent more ferocity to his blows.

In Tenchi Universe, Mihoshi pilots a suit like this to chase down Ryoko. She does quite well the first time before Ryoko destroys it. When Kiyone enters the fray and gets Mihoshi to pilot a second, that goes out the window in an instant.

In Active Raid, both the criminals and the special police unit 8 utilizes Powered Armor, here called the Willwears.

Tony Stark first built his powered armour in the Vietnamese jungle and has since made countless upgrades, redesigns and variants to stay ahead in the Powered Armor arms race with villains like Titanium Man and the Crimson Dynamo. To make matters worse, villains are constantly trying to steal his designs, and the first Spymaster succeeded. His sale of Tony's blueprints on the black market sparked the Armor Wars, a storyline in which Iron Man goes about attacking armored villains and heroes in a fit of paranoia over misuse of his inventions.

His friend James Rhodes has used Stark armor many times, either taking up the Iron Man mantle while Tony was incapacitated or presumed dead, or working independently as War Machine.

Pepper Potts also has her own armor that was designed by Tony, called "Rescue".

Spider-Man once donned one of his own, the Iron Spider armor. However, he dumped it in favor of his old red-and-blues when Civil War really picked up and he deflected from Iron Man's side.

Beyond the Iron Spider, Spidey has also created a number of armors for himself. Notable ones include the original Spider-Armor, the Sonic Armor (which became Kaine Parker's costume), the Bulletproof Spider-Armor and the Ends of the Earth armour, designed to combat the Sinister Six.

The Fantastic Four: Doctor Doom. Contrary to its almost medieval-industrial revolution aesthetic, being covered in visible rivets and displaying no apparent electronics, it is actually a nuclear-powered, ultra-sophisticated walking tank that stands up next to Tony Stark's best designs. It makes him strong and tough enough to go toe-to-toe with the Thing, discharge an array of devastating energy attacks, enables him to fly and control his vast arsenal of external technological devices. (Some versions even have a device that renders him immune to direct assault by mutant powers, so Magneto's victory over him in a fight isn't as assured as it would be against Tony.) He can basically beat the tar out of any non-"cosmic" character short of the Hulk and Squirrel Girl.

Doom also has on occasion created stronger variants of the armor, powered by draining some of the above-mentioned "cosmic" characters and thus rendering Doom's power almost as God-like as his ego. Since Doom is also a mage, he can use a combination of magic and science.

In one notable issue of Mighty Avengers (just before Civil War) Doom and Iron Man go one-on-one after the rest of the Avengers were subdued by an army of Doombots and array of traps. Their suits are so well matched that it comes down to whose suit's battery can last longer. It's Doom's.

Numerous times in the history of The Fantastic Four, Reed (or someone else) has been able to cure Ben Grimm and restore him to human form, although it never lasts. During those times, Ben has been known to use a suit of powered armor to continue to fight alongside the team, which is designed to look like the Thing, and gives him Super Strength.

In Kingdom Come Batman needs an exoskeleton to move at all (thanks to the wounds from a life-time of crimefighting). His actual Batman costume is a Powered Armor. As is the Blue Beetle's and several other heroes.

Batman foe Mr. Freeze has to wear a sealed, temperature controlled suit to even survive in lukewarm environments, due to his cryophilic physiology/disease/disorder/whatever. Many writers offset this by outfitting Freeze' suit with a powered exoskeleton capable of breaking a man in half.

In Batman vs. Predator, Batman resorts to this in order to continue the fight while recovering from the asskicking the Predator gave him earlier on. Also uses sonar to beat the Predator's cloak.

His Insider Suit was a suit with the powers of every League Member. The problem is, using those powers required a ridiculous amount of energy.

He's had power armor built for both Batwing vigilantes, one looking like a more armored version of the Batman Beyond suit.

He has broken out two power suits during the New 52. One to fight against Terminus, a dying villain whose armor doubled as life support, but also during the Night of the Owls, when he uses a suit so large it was basically a mecha. Although he used this suit specifically so that he wouldn't be frozen when Alfred lowered the temperature in the room to freeze the (undead) assassins.

Lex has twice donned a suit of green and purple Powered Armor to fight Superman mano a mano: Once in the early '80s, quickly abandoned after Crisis on Infinite Earths; and once in the mid-'00s, during the run-up to Infinite Crisis. His armour was a gift from Darkseid (it was part of the ongoing plot thread in Jeph Loeb's run about an alliance between Luthor and Darkseid.) Later stories (like Blackest Night and The Black Ring) would show Luthor occasionally using upgraded versions of the armour when necessary, and the "Up, Up, and Away" arc had some goons attempt to steal some of Luthor's suits as well.

Luthor also gains a sort of Powered Armor in Justice League. It increases his abilities, but its main purpose is to keep his Kryptonite-induced disease in check (shooting Kryptonite rays is just a bonus). The Luthor that shows up in various video games (particularly fighting games) also wears the armor.

During the New 52, he used a more sophisticated version first to fight Superman (he did pretty well, then Superman got dangerous and started kicking him all over Metropolis), then to save the world in Forever Evil. After that, he wore it while working with the Justice League.

In the DC Rebirth era, he dons a blue and red armor sporting the familiar S-shield and wears the cape of the fallen New 52 Superman in his drive to actually be a hero. This is what drives the pre-Flashpoint Superman to get back into the game as he doesn't want Luthor with that shield.

Brianna Diggers of Gold Digger uses a variety of Powered Armor, and even Gina has broken one out one or two times.

The Ninja Turtles from the year 2094 wore these during an arc in the Archie comic, based on action figure designs.

The 616 version of the Rhino is a muscular thug in a suit resembling the hide of a rhinoceros. However, the Ultimate Marvel version of the Rhino is a wimpy geek in a high-tech suit of robotic armor. They drew on this portrayal for the character's appearance in The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

The 616 version of Rhino was also briefly replaced by a power-armour wearing counterpart after he tried to go straight. When the New Rhino made the mistake of killing Classic Rhino's new wife, he got the match with his predecessor that he richly craved. Classic Rhino crushed his power-armour counterpart like he was nothing.

Dan Dreiberg of Watchmen tried making a powered exoskeleton version of his costume. It didn't get past the prototype stage; the first (and only) time he wore it, it broke his arm.

The DCU's Rocket Red Brigade, who are basically the Powered Armor division of the Russian army. Originally, their armor was blocky and square; in recent years, they've shifted to a more streamlined, figure-fitting design.

Supernaut of the Stark-backed Order uses a suit so big it practically qualifies as a miniature Humongous Mecha, with enough armament for a small army to boot. Supernaut's somewhat notable in that outside of his suit, he's a paraplegic.

The Asgardian Destroyer is an unusual example, since it is, depending on your point of view, not an armor at all, or the very purest form of armor. It is not wearable, but rather sucks up the spirit of a sapient being that comes too close to it - it cannot operate on its own, although it quickly overrides the will of anyone who powers it. Unless that individual's will is strong enough. Anyway, it's more or less an armor that is powered by its 'wearer' instead of the other way around. It might be the most powerful armor in comics (well... apart from the Celestials' armor, but that might not be armor).

In "Superman: 3D", a substory of Final Crisis, Superman and Ultraman (his evil counterpart) are merged, together, with a 'thought robot' made out of 'divine metals' by Monitor Dax Novu to defeat the Dark Monitor, Mandrakk. This 'thought robot', basically a giant (really giant. It's giant in the World of Nil, where the Monitors live - which means that it is much, much, much bigger than a universe) mecha empowered by the dual spirits of the two supermen, meant for one single battle. It is super(of course)-adaptive, getting stronger in response to its opponents' strength.

An interesting version appears in Okko—the Combat Bunraku are huge, wooden, and entirely analog, being controlled via series of ropes and pulleys by the "puppeteer" who sits in the chest cavity.

Even Captain America got in on the armored action in the mid-90s, as he was forced to wear an armored version of his familiar red-white-and-blues due to the Super-Soldier Serum breaking down in his body and rendering him paralyzed. Naturally, it didn't take.

He got a new version, briefly, under similar circumstances at the end of Time Runs Out, just prior to Secret Wars (2015), when he went after the inverted Tony Stark.

Sonic the Hedgehog's Rotor Walrus has taken up wearing Powered Armor when he decided to return to active duty.

Back during the original "Death Egg Saga", Sonic, Tails and Robotnik all donned powered armor, though Sonic and Tails' were quite unconventional — Sonic rode around in the shell of Silver Sonic while Tails rode around in the shell of a SWATBot.

In Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, it is eventually revealed that "Ultra Magnus" is actually a form of Powered Armor that has been worn by several different Autobots over the ages since the death of the original Ultra Magnus. The idea was cooked up by a lawmaker, Chief Justice Tyrest, who was so fascinated with Magnus' reputation that he created the armor and spread a story about Magnus merely faking his death to create "an eternal lawman" controlled by him. The current wearer of the "Magnus Armor" is a small, unassuming 'bot with the somewhat unfortunate name of Minimus Ambus. It's also mentioned that the wearers of the Magnus Armor have to be "Point One Percenters", meaning that they have stronger than usual sparks that allow their bodies to integrate with the armor without their frames collapsing from the strain.

Apocalypse wears Powered Armor made with Celestial technology and they are fully aware he has it and are letting him use it in exchange for future favors that enhances his already formidable superpowers and possibly granting him new ones.

Shakara: Shakara's robotic body is actually very advanced armor that is powered by the spiritual energy of the dead Shakara.

HYDRA invent a remote controlled version based on the Destroyer. It's flight capable, extremely powerful and capable of shapeshifting weapons - however, what makes it dangerous is the fact that it's being controlled by major league badass Baron Zemo and that its first set of opponents are kids in (mostly) their first life or death fight who have just been (temporarily bootstrapped to god-like levels of power and are only scratching the surface of their capabilities - as the author remarks, they should have ripped it apart in a matter of minutes and more skilled and experienced combatants do just that (plus, they're hinted to lose a little something once they go into mass production and under mass mental control.)

In the Firefly fanfic Forward, the Hands of Blue wear blue bodysuits underneath their normal suits that turn out to be a "low profile" suit of powered armor. It allows them to resist bullets and crossbow bolts, as well as allowing them to move with surprising speed and to hit extremely hard. With these suits, they are fast enough and strong enough that even River proves unable to match them in hand-to-hand combat. Fortunately, they aren't invincible, but it takes a lot of abuse to bring one down, unless you're Kaylee. Kaylee just squishes them with a power loader.

In Spirit Of Redemption the quarians and geth have made War Machine battle suits for the quarians to wear.

In Avalon, there are the Iron Suits, dummied down versions of the Iron Man suit used by Nerv.

Sky Bolt designs custom crystal-powered armor for the Dusk Guard. The basic design enhances strength and durability. When fully powered, it leaves the other guard units' enchanted armor in the dust.

Lord Maledict from Sonic X: Dark Chaos has one of these under his cloak that keeps his horrifically-mutilated and decaying physical body from falling apart. And its "studded with sacred pentagram sigils and spikes, hewn from gold and rubies, adorned with screaming souls, flanked with flaming goat skulls on the shoulders and inscribed with six hundred and sixty six prayers."

Tsali's metal endoskeleton is actually one of these, powered by Dark Chaos Energy which allows him to absorb impacts and tank nearly impossible amounts of damage.

Zero 2 A Revision introduces Holy Armors for Shaun, Davis, TK, and Kari which enhances their physical abilities and allows the Digidestined to fight alongside their own Digimons.

Sudden Contact: The terrans have the traditional CMC. In turn, CMC armors and their derivatives are becoming popular in Citadel space, such as the turians' CMC-based Hardened Mobile Exosuit (HME) which are used by turian heavy infantry, and also known as "fat falcons."

In Wonderful, the Sentinel Suits worn by Taylor -"Wonder Red"- and her allies are a kind of light armor that enhances their physical abilities.

In Big Hero 6 Hiro makes Baymax a couple suits of armor to make up for his squishiness, the second suit includes a Jet Pack, Rocket Punch, an upgraded scanner that can sweep the entire city, and magnetic pads for Hiro's suit to grab onto. Though it's unclear if he had any strength upgrade since Baymax is already capable of lifting a thousand pounds or so. The rest of Big Hero 6 get their own suits with various tricks.

Steamboy has one of the least impressive examples of Powered Armor on this list. They're basically full-plate armor with steam backpacks (how they're not cooking with that setting, we're not sure), showing immunity against small arms fire and not much else.

Max DaCosta's Exosuit gives him the strength to rip machines apart with his bare hands in his quest to reach Elysium.

Later Kruger is outfitted with a sleeker model, which appears to be a fifth-generation exosuit. That said, the armor part of the suit is shown to be distinct from the exoskeleton that allows the protagonist to walk and move. Unlike Max's older model Exosuit, a third-generation exosuit; Kruger's has more extensive armour components, including better protection for his torso. Also, unlike Max who had to undergo extensive surgery for interfacing, Kruger only needed assistance from Drakey and Crowe, as opposed to an entire surgery team, in part because Kruger already has point-mounting implants on his body that the exosuit is attached to.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra features the "Delta-6 Accelerator suit", a powered armour that allows the wearer to outrun cars, leap over speeding commuter trains in a single bound, dodge missiles and climb buildings like a hyperactive monkey. Oh yes, and it's armed (quite literally) with an on-board Gatling gun and mini-missile launcher. They're used in a single scene by the two newest recruits; the story goes that the script was originally for a HALO movie or rip-off and that scene is an artifact.

The aliens in Independence Day use biological suits, but are still weak enough that Will Smith can knock one out with his bare fist.

Iron Man is unique in that it shows the trials and tribulations that would logically have to go with actually creating and testing such a device. The sound of Tony Stark screaming in terror as his suit(s) malfunction at inopportune moments almost becomes a Running Gag. To say nothing of the disastrous North Korean, Iranian, and the cringe-inducing Hammer Tech tests in the second film.

The Deconstruction goes further in Iron Man 3, showing what happens when a PTSD-burdened, sleep-deprived Tony Stark attempts to rapidly prototype dozens of different designs. Unfortunately, they seem to suffer from Conservation of Ninjutsu.

Harry Osborn wears one as the Green Goblin in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The suit works in tandem with the spider venom in his veins and heals his injuries and ailments.

And if the supplementary materials are to be believed, the Vulture will be wearing one in The Amazing Spider-Man 3.

The Kryptonians all wear it in Man of Steel. It's bulletproof and has a self-contained atmosphere. Given the effect of Earth on Kryptonians, it seems doubtful that it enhances their strength to any meaningful degree.

The (sized more like Mini-Mecha) combat suits of the humans from The Matrix Revolutions that carried big guns but provided very little protection. Word of God has said this is because the Sentinels could easily tear through any armor they put up, making it more efficient to simply leave them unarmored. It has been shown in The Animatrix that the armored suits go down just as easily as their descendants, but prolong the suffering of the pilot.

The Tuxedo could be considered a form of Powered Armor, as it enhances the wearer's reflexes, strength, and speed. In fact, the tuxedo mostly functions on its own with the wearer only required to select a particular action from the list. In the film, Jackie Chan's character can't fight. It's the tuxedo that does all the fighting, although in the typical Jackie Chan fashion. The final fight involves a battle between Jackie Chan's character (in a super-powered tux) and the Big Bad (who managed to get one too). Somehow, though, the Big Bad is much more proficient with the tux than "Jimmy", even though "Jimmy" has been walking around in it for most of the film, while the Big Bad put it on literally two minutes before the fight. It could be justified because the Big Bad is wearing the original "superspy" suit, while Jimmy's could have been an inferior version.

In The Wolverine, the Silver Samurai is a humongous robotic suit of adamantium armor to help him face off against Wolverine.

The Shredder wears a nifty set of it designed by Eric Sacks in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014). It allows him to go head-to-head with the Turtles, sports several retractable blades per arm, and the blades can even be launched out as projectiles and drawn back with magnets.

For Your Eyes Only has a realistic version, as Bond and Melina must take on a mook in a deep-sea diving JIM suit.

Lazer Team has a set of Powered Armor created by aliens. However, thanks to a group of dimwits shooting down the alien's transport ship and taking the pieces for themselves, the four pieces are divided by the four.

Harry Harrison's Bill the Galactic Hero spared barely a paragraph to mock Heinlein's armored soldiers, showing what happens when one tries to land in a swamp... thus proving he has no concept of what Heinlein's creations can do; as a self-contained environment, the soldier inside won't care if he's fully submerged. Hell, in the first chapter of the book the character realizes he's about to land in a river, which he avoids doing only because it'll cost him precious seconds to get out.

Dominant Species by Michael E. Marks centered on a Marine Rapid Assault Team in powered armor; the depiction took a serious (rather than fantasy) approach to the depiction of powered armor capabilities and vulnerabilities.

The "living-brain" Martians in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds came very close; their war-machines straddle the line between this trope and Humongous Mecha. They also had smaller non-combat work-machines into which they strapped themselves.

The Wyverns from Into the Looking Glass start off as more Mini-Mecha, using only Earth technology, but later versions that also use Adar technology fit this trope.

The marines in David Weber's In Fury Born uses powered armor, as do the marines of Honor Harrington. Interestingly enough, we never see fights between forces equipped with Powered Armor in the Honorverse, only between the armored troopers and non-armored enemy forces. And at least one book included an example of what happens when you try to steathily land on top of a building in a heavy Power Armor suit. While they are portrayed as Nigh Invulnerable in this setting (at least against infantry), there has been at least one example of them being defeated by regular squishy unarmored personnel who catch them by surprise (and use a BFG).

Although present in Weber's and Ringo's Prince Roger series, they don't see a lot of use in the earlier books due to limited power and the environment of the Death World the titular prince's bodyguard unit is stranded on is exceedingly hostile to advanced electronics.

Joe Haldeman's classic, The Forever War, although in this case the suits had little armour.

From The Tin Man onwards, some of Dale Brown's books have featured the eponymous armours. They are noted as being resistant to bullets and eventually having limited jumpjet capability and railguns, but vulnerable to knives and missiles.

In C. J. Cherryh's Alliance/Union science fiction series, the Earth Company Marines (and, presumably, their Union equivalents) wear Powered Armor. The only really detailed description is in Rimrunners where ex-Marine Bet Yeager, late of the carrier Africa, has to repair and recondition a pair of suits and then teach a neophyte to use it.

The skin suits also have Adaptive Armor features like using reserve supplies to provide the wearer with a Healing Factor, reconfiguring itself on-the-fly to provide enhanced protection against different types of damage or even accomplishing simple tasks without the host.

Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga novels, set in a different timeline to Fallen Dragon, feature much more capable non-biological powered armour. These suits, worn by conscript soldiers in a war against a genocidal alien Hive Mind, are super-strong and protected by force fields, while also sporting plasma rifles, kinetic missiles, tactical nukes and other heavy-duty firepower. Even so, they tend to get slaughtered in a pitched battle with the aliens, who outnumber them several million to one.

Space and combat suits in the Perry Rhodan universe tend to come with basic comm gear, flight capability and some kind of force field for protection at a minimum; additional sensors, life support, fairly sophisticated built-in computers, and stealth features like invisibility are also found more often than not. Perhaps ironically, one thing that these suits are not primarily intended to function as is actual body armor; that's what the force field is for. Likewise, weapons tend to be external (and frequently hand-held) rather than integrated into the suit.

In the Vorkosigan Saga, Miles ("Mr. Naismith") Vorkosigan was too short to use the average powered armor suits of his universe, but acquired a "petite" size in his first mercenary venture. He had to have the techs adapt the plumbing to fit, though, as it was originally for a female. Later in his career he's worn powered armor so often that the equipment's left a mark on his forehead.

In Iain M. Banks's Culture novels, powered, intelligent armor features in Matter and The Hydrogen Sonata. These armor suits are pretty nifty even by the Culture's high-tech standards, providing impressive protection, massive physical strength and a significant degree of AI autonomy.

And as a protagonist in the short story "Descent" in The State of the Art, and as a device to protect the wearer in a high-gee hazardous environment populated with super-strong Starfish Aliens in 'Excession''. The latter is technically a glorified spacesuit, but anything that provides super-strength and plenty of damage resistance can easily be used for military purposes.

In UseOfWeapons the protagonist also wears powered armour/spacesuit at one stage, which he requisitioned from the Culture (though he very pointedly does not want a sentient suit). At one point he turns up his suit's strength in order to lift a large stone object but has to be very careful that he's in the correct stable and braced position.

In Ian Douglas's Heritage/Legacy/Inheritance trilogies, the USMC has these. They start out as glorified spacesuits and end up being a combination starfighter/power armor/drop pod with enough features to make the Mjolnir VI look like a Model T.

The protagonist of Gary Gibson's Stealing Light has some sort of Latex Space SuitInstant ArmourPowered Armour she stole from some aliens. If they knew about it, they'd want it back. Alas, it's implanted in place of one of her lungs (at least).

The novel Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds features powered armor suits that can fly to a planet's surface and back to orbit, extrude powerful weapons, withstand heavy damage and change their shape; oddly, they aren't mentioned in later books, even if they would be useful.

They're mentioned as being exceedingly rare and powerful by one character in that novel. Chasm City is largely empty of serious high-tech of that kind. Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap don't contain any infantry combat of note. Similar armor is, however, used in Reynolds' novella Diamond Dogs, when a group of characters uses it to gain entry to a hostile alien structure.

The Diamond Age has "Hoplites", military combat exoskeletons that seem to take the place of infantry and tanks in serious warfare. Some models are notable in that they allow the wearers to go Roof Hopping.

The Eternads of Robert Buettner's Jason Wander and Orphan's Legacy series.

Max Barry's Machine Man makes use of this when Carl the security guard needs an exo-suit to hold up his titanium sledgehammer arms.

E. E. “Doc” Smith's Lensman series is probably the Ur-Example. Galactic Patrol, the first Lensman book to be published, ends with the hero wearing a super-tough high tech suit of armor which was not explicitly described as being powered, despite being said to weigh "close to a ton." Armor explicitly described as being powered first appeared in Children of the Lens, serialized in Astounding magazine in 1947 and published in book form in 1954; the powered armor was a Lensman Arms Race outgrowth of the series's earlier armor suits.

Confederate Marines in the Confederation of Valor series use a low-key version of this. Like all their tech, the armor has to balance the benefits of powered armor with being light and flexible enough not to impede movement if the enemy uses EMP to knock out the electronics.

In the Magic: The Gathering book The Thran, the Halcyte Guard get a form of powered armor: they're lighter and tougher than conventional armor, mold themselves to fit the wearer, and the helmets even have a magical form of radio communication. The only real downside is that they're just as vulnerable to their own weapons as conventional armor is, and their swords can already slice through metal as if it were butter.

Used in Tom Kratman's Caliphate, although not in the traditional sense. The suit itself is more of an armored exoskeleton, but the ones worn by the Suited Heavy Infantry can have armor added to them to increase their protection, or reduced to enhance speed and endurance. It's explicitly pointed out when they're introduced that they do not make the wearer invulnerable, just that the user requires more effort to kill.

All You Need Is Kill refers to its powered armor as "Jackets." They're the only way that humans can really fight the alien Mimics at close range, due to their toxic biology and hardiness.

In The Hoplite by Robert Reed, the marines sent out to pillage the surrounding territory use a suit of high-tech powered armor, with a railgun in one arm and control systems to call in drone and artillery strikes.

Sergey Lukyanenko's Line of Delirium duology features the protagonists wearing power armor during their raid on the Imperial orbital base. Most Imperial soldiers also wear power armor, though. Various functions are controlled by the chin. In particular, the protagonist puts on a type of armor that can generate a plasma shield around it, not for protection but in order to walk through walls, even space station bulkheads. Melting walls with your entire armor drains the power supply, though. Apparently, any powered armor can be quickly put on and taken off without any special tools.

In Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain, this is Mech's primary schtick. He's a Mad Scientist, and the armor is his first and greatest invention. It's highly modular, capable of adapting to any device plugged into it, not to mentions millions of layers of microscopic ablative plates that let it adapt to any threat. It's also the most obvious reason that he's a clear Iron Man expy.

Devils Cape has the third and fourth Doctor Camelots. The fourth makes some significant alterations and refinements to her version of the suit.

Although derived from otherworldly "strange matter" rather than from technology, the golden battle-armor worn by the Droods of the Secret Histories series works exactly like this trope, up to and including stealth, sensory enhancements, safe-cracking and computer-hacking capacity, self-sustained oxygen supply, and near-instantaneous deployment.

In Caliban's War, the second novel in The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey, Marines of both the Martian Congressional Republic and the United Nations of Earth wear powered armor that enhances strength, protects against projectiles and radiation, and mounts a full-auto gun firing 2mm armor-piercing rounds. The suit also contains communications and sensor equipment and a computer that can identify and provide technical specifications for weapons carried by opponents.

In the Paradox Trilogy, powered armor is in common use by both the military and private mercenaries. The protagonist, Devi, owns a custom suit of powered armor called the Lady Gray.

Mach from Rumor's Block uses power armor that she based off of two older heroes' named Panzer and Sherman.

Subverted with the Great and Powerful Turtles shell in Wild Cards. It serves as armor, and Thomas Tudbury can only use his ace powers while in the shell, due to massive psychological problems and an inferiority complex of epic proportions.

In All Men of Genius, Violet (who's attending a Steampunk science academy while disguised as a man) designs something like this. She sees it as benefiting women, since if it becomes common, any question of physical strength differences between the sexes is rendered moot.

In Stark's War, all American ground forces wear powered combat suits. These are beneficial on Earth, but are essential on the Moon (what with the lack of air and all). However, Stark notes that "armor" isn't really a very accurate description any more, because most modern weapons can punch through the suits fairly easily. Effectively, they're used as fancy high-mobility space suits rather than as protection.

In the Young Bond novel Strike Lightning, a death of Bond's schoolmate leads him to uncovering a plot to sell steampunkish exo-suits to the Nazis as Germany is rearming itself. In the finale, Bond has to wear one, and is forced to take on the Nazis' more advanced suits.

Dire of The Dire Saga cannibalizes the power-suit of a fallen hero, Scrapper, to build her own armor.

Live Action TV

The Daleks from Doctor Who are basically evil lumps of flesh encased in salt-shaker-shaped personal tanks that function the same way Powered Armor does for humanoids.

The Cybermen, both the original and the Alternate Universe version in the new series, were originally designed as a suit to increase the vitality and lifespan of the wearer.

The Ice Warriors wear powerful armor in Earth's atmosphere, and in "Cold War" it could act autonomously from its user.

The Arcturus delegate from "The Curse of Peladon" is housed within a mechanical transport housing somewhat like a Dalek's, although in his case it's mainly for life-support in a non-aquatic environment.

In Luke Cage, Diamond puts on a power suit for his final fight with the titular character.

On Stargate Atlantis, the Lost Tribe faction of the Asgard wear humanoid-shaped power armor suits that provide them with mobility, protect them from hazardous environments, and come equipped with blasters and built-in energy shields. They're also conveniently designed to automatically adjust to the wearer, so other races that aren't bigger than the armor's maximum size can wear them.

This is extremely convenient, given that that all the Asgard we have seen are half the size of the average human, and as they are a race of clones, we can reasonably presume that their stature is pretty uniform.

Intimidation probably has something to do with it. Admit it, you'd be half as afraid of someone wearing armor half your size than someone who is larger. Also, if it came to hand-to-hand combat, a smaller power armor would probably be at a disadvantage.

It also serves to hide the identity of the wearer. After all, if you encounter a power armor soldier half your size, you'd immediately think of all the races you know that size (hint: 1). A generic human size means the identity isn't easy to guess.

The same goes for most man-made Kamen Riders, with the prime example being IXA, and the earliest being G3.

Kamen Rider G3, Kamen Rider G4, G3-Mild and V1 in Kamen Rider Agito are the earliest examples. Some tie-ins include Kamen Riders G2 and G1 with more similarity to Kamen Rider Kuuga.

All of the Rider Gears from Kamen Rider 555, especially Delta which can be used by normal humans but it's powers are addictive.

Kamen Rider IXA is an interesting example as it actually goes through research and development. The version used by Otoya, Yuri and Jiro in 1986 is a prototype prone to overheating while this problem is fixed in the 2008 version used by Nago.

Kamen Rider Birth is similar as you get the actual Birth armour and Proto-Birth it's slightly weaker prototype.

A Villain Of The Week develops an exoskeletal suit that allows him to move as fast as The Flash. Then his control chip gets damaged. Cue the "bug on its back" sight.

Ever since it first appeared in Power Rangers in Space, the Battlizer power-up has usually been a staple upgrade for the Red Ranger and occasionally other Rangers in Power Rangers. Of course, the source of their Powered Armor varies by series.

Other human forces also use power armor, particularly the Sister of Battle and some Inquisitors, but because they lack the Black Carapace - a sub-dermal layer of neural interfaces implanted towards the end of the Space Marine creation process - they aren't able to use the armor to its fullest potential.

Spyrers are ordinary humans from the the heights of Necromunda's Hive Primus who use Powered Armor to achieve Clothes Make The Super Man. It's hinted that their ancient, possibly alien suits are actually The Symbiote, as they literally grow stronger and more powerful as the wearer gets more used to them. These are unusual artefacts belonging to noble families rather than standard military gear, however.

The Tau may come closest to the Starship Troopers example, in that their Crisis suits can mount an array of heavy weapons and gadgets, but also sport jet packs that allow them to cross difficult terrain and pop in and out of cover. Broadside suits lack this mobility, but make up for it by carrying railguns that are among the most effective anti-armor weapons in the game. In both cases, the suits are large enough to straddle the line between Powered Armor and Mini-Mecha, though in gameplay terms they're treated as infantry, not walker vehicles.

Ork"Nobs" sometimes have their Mekboyz assemble suits of Mega Armor, scrapyard knock-offs of Terminator Armor that are even more unwieldy than their inspiration. Still, between Orky know-how and the inhuman strength of their wearers, crude in this case does not mean ineffective.

Eldar armor is powered in a different respect - it's made from a psychically-reactive material that reshapes itself as its wearer moves to provide maximum protection while still fitting like a glove, and hardens when struck to disperse the force of a blow. Because of the technology that goes into making it, it is also lighter than other races' versions; allowing them greater speed, mobility, and grace. The suits worn by Aspect Warriors are stronger and bulkier for the most part, while the Exarchs who lead such squads benefit from the centuries of combined combat experience provided by the spirit stones of the armor's former bearers.

Despite its medieval setting, Warhammer has Chaos Armor, another case of daemon-powered armor. The Albion campaign expansion also introduced the High Elf "Armour of the Gods," sucpiciously identical in effect to Warhammer 40,000's Power Armor.

WARMACHINE features military commanders wearing technomagical suits called Warcaster Armor. Additionally, the empire of Khador reserves valuable robot cyberbrains for only their largest war robots, with the role of light armor being filled by soldiers sturdy enough to wear Man O' War suits. There's even a soldier wearing this bulky powered armor on horseback, and his mount gets its own powered barding to compensate.

Rackham's AT43 features suits of powered armor for nearly every army (including Space Gorillas).

Rifts sings "The Girl is Mine" with Warhammer every Saturday on the subject. It also enjoys playing with the trope to a degree usually not seen. Many units that one might classify as powered armor from their size, like the Triax Ulti-Max and Coalition States Terror Trooper, are in fact very small piloted combat robots instead of worn suits, while some worn suits such as the Glitterboy are simply so powerful as to intrude on combat robot territory. The Lunar Colony's VRDS system takes it Up to Eleven by allowing one to wear a combat robot like it was power armor.

The books even state (at least for the Terror Trooper) that such suits blur the line between Power Armor (Rifts doesn't use the -ed) and Giant Robots. The defining characteristic seems to be that Power Armor is one man, while Giant Robots need a crew of 2-5.

Traveller had "Battle Dress" armor, which was pretty much an Iron Man suit for every G.I. in the Imperial forces. Besides its protective function, the powered armor was the only way to handle the recoil and backblast from the awesome FGMP-14.

While BattleTech is best known for its 'Mechs, there's also Powered Armor down there, ranging from simple suits worn by special-forces troopers, to one-ton monsters capable of taking down a 'Mech in teams and withstanding their weaponry, to two-ton four-legged machines more piloted than worn, with enough firepower to shame an infantry company.

The Clan genetics program has culminated in the birth of huge humans to pilot their massive Powered Armor; the Elementals. Even one outside of the likewise-named armor can dismember an armored opponent with their bare hands, and the massive brutes top seven or even eight feet tall. Elemental armor fits above into the 'one-ton monster' variety, a sizable fraction being the pilot itself. Examine for yourself a cutaway diagram of the standard Clan Elemental battle armor◊.

Much like the larger Battlemechs, the powered armour technology is even present in the civilian market throughout the Inner Sphere, with uses ranging from police and rescue work to forklift truck analogues (which was presented as a clear homage to Aliens).

Given Exalted's attitude towards the Rule of Cool (namely, if the concept exists and is sufficiently awesome, put it in the game), it should come as no surprise that there are many, many examples of this to be found in Creation, ranging from Gunzosha (which can even be worn by mortals, at the cost of a mere half their lifespan) to Celestial Battle Armor (which is as tough as Superheavy Plate armor, far less restrictive, and can usually fly).

Cyberpunk 2020 introduced an entire subclass of Solo called 'PA Trooper' who's only reason for existence was using various heavily-armed suits of Powered Armor. The supplement 'Maximum Metal' was mostly devoted to their design.

Although Mekton primarily focuses on Humongous Mecha, the scaling rules provide two different power levels for powered armor - the smaller Human Scale (which are light powered suits on the Iron Man - Bubblegum Crisis axis) and larger Roadstriker Scale (which are slightly larger and bulkier, on a rough size and mass scale with a large motorcycle to a light truck).

Pretty much every side in Cthulhu Tech is a big fan of powered armour. Of course, how dangerous they are is entirely dependent on what they're up against. They're basically invincible to infantry level firepower, requiring specialist anti-armour weapons to scratch, while carrying guns which can kill a normal human/Migou/Deep One with a single shot. On the other hand, up against anything larger, they're the Glass Cannon, who tend to get crippled if they get hit at all.

Genius: The Transgression lists this as one possible product of the defensive Prostasia axiom (although you have to use the travel axiom Skafoi to make it fly and the weapons axiom Katastrofi to give it weaponry).

And the Exelixi axiom for super-strength... a good suit tends to be an expensive investment for a veteran Genius. But oh so worth it.

Powered Armor characters are common in Champions. This is in part because putting superpowers into armor, which the character presumably won't be wearing all the time and which can be potentially damaged, stolen or destroyed, serves to make them somewhat cheaper point-wise; on the more in-universe level, power armor also has the advantage of being one of the easier ways to enable otherwise non-powered agents to at least try to deal with super-threats, so quite a few organizations employ it.

One of the most powerful human villains in the official game universe is Doctor Destroyer, who wears a suit of powered armor that lets him take out (spelled "kill") whole teams of superheroes.

PRIMUS and DEMON Organization Book. PRIMUS had the Iron Guard and DEMON had two different types of Mechagents (Type I and Type II). All three consisted of agents wearing the stated power armor suits.

A fair number of powered armor suits survived the Last War in Deadlands: Hell on Earth. The trick isn't so much finding one as getting it to work for more than fifteen minutes in the Scavenger World left After the End.

GURPS: Ultra-Tech has a slew of them. The most powerful is the TL12 "Warsuit" which, just for starters, is armored with layers hyper dense regenerating metal alloy and multiplies an ordinary person's strength 25 times over. There's also the clever "Exo-Field Belt" which is Powered Armor made out of nothing but forcefields.

Mutants & Masterminds: while the Device power can be used to represent anything from the hammer Mjolnir to a Green Lantern Ring, the battlesuit is one of the coolest uses. (Especially since there are no restrictions on what you can give a battlesuit save the points available, meaning that it's not impossible to build a suit that lets you warp time.)

To expand, there are two types of device. Those you can remove with a disarm check (weapons) and those you can only remove from someone only when he's unconscious. This include powered armors.

It is technically possible to do this in Shadowrun by combining multiple levels of Mobility Upgrade, Strength Upgrade, and Hydraulic Jacks on a suit of milspec or modern Samurai armor, but your GM will not be pleased.

The d20 Modern supplement D20 Future features Powered Armor in a few different forms. The standard version is a fairly basic version, providing a sealed, protected environment and enabling flight, but not giving the wearer any offensive abilities. Blurring the line with Mini-Mecha, the Mecha chapter includes rules for Large size Mechs (roughly 9-11 feet tall) that act more like the Marauder suits from Starship Troopers; they grant the wearer a sizable Strength bonus (+8 for the smallest, when a normal human's absolute maximum is 18) and serve as mounting brackets for heavy armor, shielding, and weapons too heavy for a normal human to wield (such as .50 caliber chainguns and rocket launchers), with options for sealed environments, flight capability, and other neat doodads.

Fading Suns has some powered armors, but these are rare and it's hard to get your hands one one. The most accessible ones are powered just enough to compensate for their weight (allowing you to wear it with no penalties as long as it has power), better ones outright enhance the wearer's strength.

In Sentinels of the Multiverse, Bunker wears a suit of advanced, US military-engineered power armor capable of "wielding the firepower of an entire battalion." And going by the amount of dakka he can lay down once he arms up, that's not hyperbole.

The Singularity System features powered armors which allow personal-scale combatants to effectively be treated as vehicles for vehicle-scale combat.

The PCs are at an audience with the Mandrill when he decides to capture them. He and his soldiers open fire on them with neurostunner pistols that cause unconsciousness. If that fails to take them down, several soldiers wearing the special armor from Chapter 4 will appear and attack.

While the PCs are escaping from Mandrill's base, one his soldiers wearing a battlesuit attacks them. She uses a neurostunner built into her armor to knock them out.

Eclipse Phase has powered exoskeletons for those who prefer biomorphs but want to take on synthmorphs in close combat. The higher-end models have integral makers that can recycle their occupants' air, water, and food indefinitely, and actually better armor than a Reaper morph. No weapon mounts though.

One of the previews for Hc Svnt Dracones shows off the "Pangolin Diffusion System", midweight powered armor meant for bomb squads. It projects a superheated field that vaporizes bomb triggers and can curl up into an armored ball, resulting in a few embarrassing web videos where pangolin suits are seen being thrown like cannonballs.

The final product has four types of powered armor, ranging from the lightweight Mobility Augmentation Rig to the superheavy MC-850 LEADARM. And then there's living armor made by Transcendent Technologies Inc, which might start sucking the wearer's blood if it takes too much damage.

Erisian 'Knight' Armor from Rocket Age is this for a race of giant gorilla people.

Myriad Song has a variety of exoskeleton outfits, their main use being to mount waldoes with weapons.

Judges Guild's Wilderlands of High Fantasy (Issue N) has a plethora of relic high tech items with little description, including mechanical power armor.

The Golden Armour, although it's more of a fantasy variant than most of the science fiction examples on this page. It has the power to incinerate Antidermis, including all the Kraata inside Rahkshi, and permanently transfers the Kraata's powers to the user. The Toa Nuva's Adaptive Armor also develops different characteristics to enhance the wearer's performance depending on the environment.

There's also the Exo-Toa which, as the name suggests, are an exo-skeleton armour for a Toa. If needs be they can function independently making them robots as well as Power Armour.

Some of the figures fro Kenner's Total Justice line from the 90's, which featured various DC Comics heroes. Some made sense, but others were pretty WTF-worthy (why would Superman or The Flash need armor?)

The X-Men: Mutant Armor and Spider-Man: Techno Wars lines. If you're wondering why heroes who already have superpowers would need to wear suits of armor, it's because the figures were all recycled Iron Man toys with new paint jobs and head sculpts.

Master Chief John-117's MJOLNIR armor is one of the most well-known video game examples. A fusion-powered, energy-shielded suit of death that makes the operator so powerful that he can flip tanks over with little effort. It is literally too much for a normal human to take, which is why only Spartan super-soldiers, who are biologically and cybernetically enhanced to post-human levels, can don the suits.

Halo also has the Arbiter, who wears power armor that's functionally the same as Master Chief's, but with a cloaking device and the added bonus of being a legendary religious artifact. Minus the artifact status, every other Elite in the series wears armor pretty much identical to it; ironically, the Arbiter suit is an antiquated relic in comparison to the more modern Covenant standard-issue suits.

In addition to the Spartan-IIs' MJOLNIR Mrk. IV-VI armor and the Spartan-IVs' GEN2 MJOLNIR, Halo features SPI (Semi-Powered Infiltration) armor worn by Spartans-IIIs, and arguably the Cyclops Exoskeleton (though most models are designed more for repair and heavy utility work than combat).

The manual for Halo: Reach implies that combat Scarabs are not so much vehicles piloted by a Lekgolo worm colony (as fans previously assumed) as a huge Lekgolo worm colony in a similarly massive suit of Powered Armor. For some idea of the scale here, the combat Scarab is adapted from a form of fully-mechanical mobile mining platform. They also normally carry a complement of more normally-sized infantry to protect against boarding attempts and man mounted guns.

The Halo Legends short Prototype shows us another one: the HRUNTING/YGGDRASILMark I Prototype Armor Defense System, a weapon so powerful that it made a normal soldier amount to an entire battalion. Before it could be mass-produced, however, the UNSC ordered its destruction to prevent it from falling into enemy hands, as the research station was being overrun; the guy assigned to do it took out a couple hundred Covenant soldiers, as well as a few fliers and tanks before he activated the self-destruct, which in itself resulted in a nuclear explosion visible from orbit.

Forerunners wore suits of armor for their entire lives, which, among other things, gave them virtual immortality, had their own personal AI (or Ancilla), and took away the need to sleep. Warriors wore a varient known as "Combat Skin": in Halo: Combat Evolved, 343 Guilty Spark claims that Chief's MJOLNIR would rate Class 2 on the Combat Skin power-scale, and recommended he switch to Class 12 or higher. Just how outclassed the MJOLNIR armor is in comparison to a Forerunner Combat Skin is clearly demonstrated in Halo 4, where the Didact handily throttles the Master Chief - repeatedly.

In Halo 5: Guardians, even Cortana wears it, despite being an AI. It's an interesting way of visually showing her new militaristic tendencies, considering her naked appearance in the previous games.

Samus's suit itself is essentially a modified (for humansnote Technically Samus was modified a bit herself by the Chozo so she could survive on their planet but she's still a very different shape to a "normal" Chozo warrior.) version of a Chozo warrior's armour. Of course, being a race of Actual Pacifist aliens, Samus is the only Chozo (by adoption, of course) to take up the mantle for hundreds of years.

Tribes has everyone wearing a suit of Powered Armor, complete with Jet Pack. They come in three sizes: light/scout, medium/assault, and heavy/juggernaut. They can be further customized with a variety of packs that draw from the armor's energy supply (or in the case of the energy pack, give increased recharge rate), such as a shield pack, repair pack, cloaking pack, or sensor jammer pack.

In Warframe, every single Warframe is a suit of power armor controlled by an organic host Tenno from afar that is capable of channeling the user's innate power into different abilities, which are dependent on the frame. They are also highly resilient, much more so than any enemy in the game that isn't wearing extremely bulky and unwieldy armor. They even allow for parkour and jumps through the air inconceivable by humans.

Planetside has the MAX (Mechanized Assault eXoskeleton) suits. Extremely powerful and durable, but are fairly clumsy and expensive. Each empire has its own set of anti-air/vehicle/infantry MAXes with a unique ability: the Vanu Sovereignty get a Jump Jet Pack, the Terran Republic can anchor down to increase their twin cannon's rate of fire, and the New Conglomerate gets a regenerating bubble shield. The sequel adds more customization such as a different cannon on each arm, and alters the abilities, with the NC getting an energy riot shield, the VS getting a berserk mode, and all factions having access to a forward charge ability.

Turrican's protagonist wears the eponymous suit, which has plenty of weapons and a spiky ball mode not too much unlike Samus Aran's.

Opposing Force reveals that while the US Military didn't adopt the suit itself, they adapted the reactive armor aspect, in the form of the Powered Combat Vest.

Myst has the Environment Verification suit, designed by the Guild of Maintainers to test Ages; a user would be given a small Linking Book that'd fit in one glove, with the other to Link back, the Link done in a 2-second timespan for the suit's on-board sensors to collect data on the Age for study. Being made of a special type of D'ni stone, the EV suit would be capable of protecting the wearer from hazards up to a supernova. The suit mostly came in a heavy, lumbering model that restricted movement to the point of requiring rollers to move on, but Uru features a skintight model that players could wear and run around in at will.

StarCraft has several types, most of them Terran. The only reason the Terran infantry stands a chance against the Zerg is that they're in that armor that makes a regular human about as strong as a Hydralisk (and just as large); the guns also help, letting them draw first blood against Zerglings. Protoss Zealots get powered armor as well, but theirs is more geared around a plasma shield and cybernetics than actual armor. It makes the Zealots capable of killing 3 or 4 enemies each when properly used.

In the sequel, you get to see it up close. Marine CMC suits aside, Firebat and Marauder armor systems are frikkin' huge, more like Mini-Mecha than anything else; almost the size of a tank.

In fact, the Marine suit straddles the line with Mini-Mecha as the Marine's hand is actually inside the suit's forearm while the suit's hand is fully mechanical.

Section 8 has players using Powered Armor - which allows them to 'burn in', that is, rain themselves from 15000 feet in the air to the ground. In ten seconds. Among other things.

Metal Gear Solid. Although in the original the Cyborg Ninja was a cyborg instead of a guy in a Powered Armor, in the sequel it is this way.

And how does ex-president George Sears AKA Solidus Snake stay limber despite premature aging? Power Armor.

His Arsenal Tengu goons wore something similar, just without the tentacles and with a gas mask.

The Beauty and the Beast unit in number 4 counts, too as well as the form fitting suits worn by the Frogs that allow them to leap over 2 meter walls in a single bound.

One brief rail shooter scene in MGS4's South America features actual powered armor mooks. They don't show up anywhere else.

Snake himself uses powered armor in Metal Gear Solid 4: his OctoCamo suit augments his prematurely aged muscles, allowing him to operated as if he were a man of a much younger age. Without it, he finds it difficult to even stand.

In Revengeance, Raiden's original combat augmentations were externalized in a bodysuit (a la Gray Fox) while he used a more humanlike body to facilitate bodyguard duty.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: You can use the Parasite Suit to gain temporary superpowers (one of which is Rock Armor), but the charges required are EXPENSIVE. The Elite Mooks have their bio-augmenting symbiotes cover every millimeter of their skin, so it's also like powered armor (and the only source of the charges required to fuel the Parasite Suit).

The Fallout series prominently features powered armor developed before the Great War of 2077. Almost every game has featured its unique power armor design on the box art.

Fallout has T-51b Power Armor, the uniform of the Brotherhood of Steel. Powered by a nuclear battery, it is said to be the most advanced military hardware ever fielded before the war.

Fallout 3 features the less-advanced T-45d model as the Brotherhood's new uniform on the East Coast. This is apparently because the T-51 series has become exceptionally rare in the decades since the first game, though one suit of it can still be found in the depths of Fort Constantine. Sadly, neither model is particularly effective due to the game's handling of damage resistance.

Fallout: New Vegas sees the return of truly effective power armor, with an overhaul of the damage system that makes armor ratings more meaningful. It also features the return of the Enclave's Advanced Power Armor from the second game as a quest reward for helping the Enclave Remnants.

Fallout 4 features the T-60 series armor, a Super Prototype model that was only just entering field testing when the bombs fell. The game also overhauls power armor completely: rather than just being a set of armor equipped via the inventory screen, it behaves almost like a vehicle, with its own power source, customization, Subsystem Damage, and the ability to freely enter and exit the armor. Every suit of power armor was redesigned to look more plausible: bulkier, shoulder-ier, and more proportional to the human inside.

In the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, powered exoskeletons have been smuggled into the Zone after the Ukrainian special forces ditched it for being outrageously expensive. It is comprised of a full-body closed-circuit Kevlar radiation suit augmented with composite or titanium panels, with the exoskeleton itself being a framework of servomotors and synthetic muscles surrounding the suit. It is the most protective armor in the game and can increase your carrying capacity, though the suit is so bulky that it prevents sprinting. In Shadow of Chernobyl it is a Eleventh Hour Superpower gained in the final hour of the plot, but in subsequent games it can be obtained far earlier albeit at extreme cost, and in Call of Pripyat it can be upgraded with faster servomotors or a basic Auto Doc.

One must question what the powered armor-user thought would happen when he decided to become a technologist (as using steampunk powered armor heavily implies he's become) considering that the universe operates on Magic Versus Science logic and the Hidden Elf Village is a community of master mages.

Killzone and Killzone 2 give us the Heavy Assault troops (Abbreviated to just "Heavies" in the second game) who wear big bulky Faceless suits of powered armour, often carry some of the heavy hitting weaponry, and soak up tonnes of punishment before finally dying (especially in the second game).

But before that, a couple of little-known games called Hero Senki and Super Hero Sakusen combined Tokusatsu heroes like Kamen Rider and Ultraman with Gundam pilots wearing Powered Armor versions of their Mobile Suits, though in Super Hero Sakusen it was implied that the Gundams and original mechs were full-size. Don't think about it too hard.

Hero Senki also featured the first appearance of one of Banpresto's most wide-ranging original mecha, the Gespenst, in Powered Armor form. It later got upgraded to a Humongous Mecha in Super Robot Wars 4.

Mass Effect has this, to an extent. Regular armor is still powered, but it can be upgraded with a more powerful exoskeleton that increases melee damage. (Especially noticable if they already had something that boosts melee attacks, like the assault training talent.)

Mass Effect 3 has the multiplayer N7 Destroyer, who wears a "T5-V Battlesuit". This includes a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, a Shockwave Stomp and a "Devastator Mode" that increases fire rate and weapon damage at the cost of turning you into a Mighty Glacier. The turian DLC characters wear armor similar to Garrus - except with a Jet Pack function.

The Inferno and Collector armor suits, the former re-used in multiplayer as the N7 Paladin, are built to give the wearer some of the traditional benefits of power armor. In the Inferno armor's case, you can actually see motors on the elbows and knees.

In a non-combat example, in Mass Effect 3, James wonders if someone couldn't invent a powered suit that would enable Joker to walk around normally despite his brittle bones. Joker responds that such suits do exist: a bit pricey, but he could afford one if he really wanted. He doesn't have one because he likes to feel the Normandy move with his whole body as he's piloting, and wearing one of those suits would interfere with that.

Several of the assault characters in Evolve have one of these. Markov has the simplest version, a Space And Low Gravity Environment suit modified with a jetpack and a personal force field. Parnell has a military grade one, which comes with the forcefield and jetpack as well as a Super Serum injector. Lennox has the most elaborate one, modified from a magmadiver suit, which has a plasma lance built into one arm and an auto cannon in the other, plus the standard gear.

Crysis pretty much centers on the deployment, uses and functionality of a semi-realistic, 2020's Power Armor suit. This "Nano-muscle suit" or Nanosuit is designed like a materials scientist's wet dream, with a reactive fabric that can, in turn, make the user bulletproof, super-fast with enhanced reflexes and dexterity, super-strong (and by that we mean "bring-a-whole-house-down-with-nothing-but-your-fists" strong), or invisible. It also includes a large suite of sensors, scanners, emitters and recording equipment, and a medical system that can bring the user back from the brink of death in a few seconds. It's as close to being Superman as one is likely to get in this century. The only problem is, just like today, the power source. Exertion of any of the four suit functions drains power very quickly (especially the cloak, which increases power drain with movement speed). The capacitor banks recharge quickly, but there are significant intervals of vulnerability, especially outside of Armor mode.

US Army Intelligence also seems to thinks that the larger alien machines, the flying Scouts and giganticHunters, are actually a sort of powered "exosuit" for the rather feeble, jellyfish-like Aliens. In Crysis 2 this is made clearer, as the main enemies are mollusk-like alien organisms granted rigidity and legs via an advanced robot exoskeleton.

The Nanosuit 2 in the sequel takes this trope and kicks it into orbit. The suit is more of a symbiote that can fully integrate with the user on a molecular level, growing its nanofabric into wounds and replacing vital functions, essentially keeping a corpse not only alive, but in combat capacity far beyond that of a normal soldier. It also features an advanced AI that can link up with your brain and save a copy of your personality if you actually kick the bucket. All of the previous functionality is ported over and improved as well.

The best (and most expensive) form of armor tech in any turn-based XCOM game is generally this. Flying Armor, Magnetic Ion Armor, X-COM Armor (sic) all apply. The first two even give you unlimited flying, allowing for much more freedom in moving around the battlefield. Sadly, these suits do nothing against any of the game's Demonic Spiders.

Except for Chryssalids, which can't attack you (or create more doubles of themselves) if you're on air. It's not advisable to hover too near to them, in any case.

X-COM Armor in Apocalypse is not in fact powered, but simply extremely light. Marsec Armor on the other hand...

Note that this the opposite of how "Powered Armor" worked in the first game: The Power Suit (the penultimate armor in the first game) consisted of thick armor plating and a power source that just restores normal mobility and strength to the user. With nothing but heavy armor plates and a sealed environment, this is just about as basic as powered armor gets. The "Flying Suit" is the same design with flight capacity.

Spiritual SuccessorUFO After Blank has two varieties of powered armor in Aftermath. Human powered armor is the standard version of this trope, but since it was in prototyping before the alien invasion, it has several drawbacks, most notably the fact that the user cannot run. However, carrying capacity is vastly increased, and the powered armor is the only way to use deployableweapon turrets. On the other side of the equation is the Reticulan bio-armor, which doesn't enhance statistics, but actually acts as a symbiotic armor layer (some of which can project a personal shield) powered by, well, whatever a symbiotic armor layer eats.

2012's XCOM: Enemy Unknown features powered Titan and Archangel armor, the former being the heaviest armor in the game and the latter being jet-pack-equipped flying armor.

The 2013 Enemy Within expansion adds giant MEC armor, which turns its users into walking tanks with built in flamethrowers, power fists and grenade launchers; on the downside, it can only be used by special cyborg troopers who must have all four limbs amputated before they can use the armor.

In XCOM: Enemy Within there is an enemy unit called a Mechtoid, which is a Sectoid (one of The Greys) in a large mechanized suit.

In XCOM 2 the research project for the third tier of armor is explicitly referred to as powered armor. It comes in three variants: medium armor (Warden Armor), which provides light armor, moderate hp, and an extra item slot; light armor (Wraith Suit), which provides moderate hp, mobility, and dodge, and gives the user the ability to grapple and walk through walls; and heavy armor (W.A.R. Suit), which provides heavy armor, moderate hp, a heavy weapon slot, and allows the user to act as temporary cover for teammates.

Most of the units from Tiberian Sun and Tiberium Wars, particularly the GDI Commando and Zone Trooper units from Tiberium Wars.

The Wolverine looks more like a Mini-Mecha (and does have an entry in that trope page) and is built from the vehicle factory, but is described as powered assault armor in both of the two games it shows up in. It also uses infantry voice clips in Tiberian Sun.

The predecessors of the Zone Trooper armor and the Wolverine are the Mobius suit and the X-O Powersuit, respectively. The former was built by Dr. Ignatio Mobius during the First Tiberium War mainly to protect the wearer from exposure to Tiberium. His daughter modified it to be effective in combat. The X-O Powersuit was designed for combat and was armed to the teeth (an 8mm minigun, a 20 MW laser, and a 35mm rocket launcher). Presumably, the less powerful but more cost-effective Wolverine was designed as the mass-produced version.

With the most recent expansion pack in the series, Cryo Legionnaires as well. Their suits are noted as making tesla troopers' look downright primitive, and give them vastly increased speed and the ability to walk on water in addition to the usual protection.

There is also Desolators, whose suit doubles as life support for their unlucky pilots.

According to what is All There in the Manual, the Alto Angelo enemies from Devil May Cry 4 are what happens when demon-ascended members of the Order of the Sword use the Bianco Angelo Animated Armor suits as Powered Armor, although this does not fully explain the different capabilities of the former. Then again, demons and magic.

Arcana Heart: One of Mei-Fang's supers has her pulling out a Powered Armor from... somewhere and shoulder-tackling her opponent while wearing it. If Mei-Fang has enough for a second super attack, she could then follow it up with a blast from its shoulder canon.

Mega Man Zero 3 has Omega, an Ax-Crazy Reploid bringer of Demise who is none other than Zero's original Body that has been enhanced to reach its limits wearing an enormous suit of armor designed for him by Dr. Weil.

Mega Man ZX: The Biometals? The Biometal envelops the Chosen Ones with a Powered-Armor based on the previous character the Model was based on. Of course, this is a topic of contention among several fans.

Depending if you consider it powered or not, BioShock's Big Daddies wear armored diving suits. The game does state that they require certain circuit boards (R-34s) to run properly, that and the drill needs fuel, as well as the helmet lights. Obviously the power has to come from somewhere, and it certainly doesn't come from the guy inside.

In Star Wars: Jedi Outcast Galak Fyyar wears a huge battle suit with lightsaber-resisting cortosis, shield generator and other toys. There's also the Shadowtroopers, dark Jedi also clad in lightsaber-resistant armor. Not that this poses a problem for Kyle Katarn.

Jedi Academy adds Hazard Troopers, who are typically armed with one of the game's two BFGs, armored enough to take multiple lightsaber strikes, and can smack the player away if they get too close.

Well, they didn't so much add them as bring them from the first game, Dark Forces, where the main mission of the game is to destroy the factory making the armor for droid Dark Troopers, but the final stage is power armor for the General in charge.

This is pretty much the entire idea behind the Technology origin, and the Arachnos Wolfspider Archetype has powers based around giant suits of armor.

Some enemies start building up robotic armor as well, especially the Longbow and Arachnos soldiers (though the former eventually drop the armor and get superpowers instead.)

In Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, all members of the hazard team wear highly advanced armor with shielding and regenerative capabilities, as well as lots of fancy electronics. When you pause the game, you can see a diagram of the armor that they use. The armor is also equipped with a pattern buffer (a version of the transporter that converts matter into energy and stores the energy matrix to re-convert to matter on-demand) that justifies the use of a Hyperspace Arsenal.

Human marines (which are not shown in-game, but appear in a splash/loading screen) are supposed to use this. Though in the actual game they're just used for boarding actions, instead of ground combat they use Orbital Bombardment.

However, one of the spin-offs in beta, Sword of the Stars: Ground Pounders is all about ground combat and the human and Tarka infantry appear to be wearing armor at the very least.

The Suul'ka are Liir Elders who wear Powered Armor that allows them to live in space. The armor is a very crucial part of the backstory since the main reason the Liir are so advanced is because the Suul'ka psychically enslaved the younger Liir to jumpstart an industrial revolution solely to build those spacesuits.

One of the ground troop technologies available in the Master of Orion series.

Syphon Filter 2 had the Emergency Defense Squad from the Bio Lab Escape level who can only be killed by explosions. Chance and Rhoemer (in a flashback in part 3) both wore Nigh Invulnerable high-impact kevlar armor. Ditto for Anton Girdeux in the first game.

System Shock 2 has a notable example in that although the powered armor is the best armor, it - surprise! Requires power and will prove no protection when the power runs out, until it's recharged again. And in the later levels of the game, you can go a very long time without finding a recharge station...

The Sacred Armour of Antiriad (from the old ZX Spectrum game of the same name). Naturally, it is an Anti-Rad suit with a "gravity displacer" and a "pulsar beam" launcher.

HACS (Heavy Armour Combat Suits) that the terrorists use in Razing Storm generally serve to be the game's Giant Mooks.

The Silencers from Crusader have a kind of powered armor as their uniform. The armor itself doesn't (apparently) increase strength or speed, but it can mount a dizzying array of technological devices, including wide-spectrum vision, targeting sensors, personal shielding (against weaponry and hard radiation), and also apparently comes with a backpackof holding standard. Oh, and it's apparently made of polonium, which (among other things) is ridiculously radioactive.

In the Dead Space games, everyone wears a form of powered exoskeleton called RiG (Resource Integration Gear) that serves to monitor health and personal resources, and manages communications and interfacing with other machines and computer systems. On top of the standard RiGs, the games' protagonists usually wear an enclosed suit of armor, complete with Collapsible Helmet. These suits have specific profession-based designs (Soldier, Engineer, Archaeologist, Miner, etc), but regardless of the individual model, they are all vacuum-enabled with an oxygen supply, zero-gravity boots and thrusters and have incorporated armor & weapons management systems. So even a lowly systems engineer has a chance in the unlikely event of a SpaceZombie Apocalypse.

Relatively late in Silent Storm, you gain access to Panzerkleins, developed by THO scientist. They're as ridiculous as they sound, and if you want to finish the game, you'll need all of them you can get. Panzerkleins make your soldiers immune to anything but armor-piercing rounds, heavy explosives, and energy weapons. The armor itself is very difficult to destroy. It's much easier to kill the pilot and take it for yourself. The Big Bad even has a flying variant.

The stand-alone Expansion Pack returns the Panzerkleins halfway through. This time, though, they are much more susceptible to damage, although small arms fire is still mostly useless.

Prominently featured in Conduit 2. Players can also customize their armor loadouts for different attribute buffs.

Time Shift had a pretty nice suit, a bit like The Master Chief's, except you didn't need to be superhuman to use it, but still made you stronger, faster, provided shields, in addition to providing the power to slowdown time, stop time and reverse it (like 10 seconds).

Featured prominently in Vanquish, which basically allows the user to go Crazy Awesome. Comes with a shapeshifting gun!

The Demonica in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is designed to withstand the environment of the Schwartzwelt. Its Adaptive Armor abilities allow it to increase the wearer's performance to superhuman levels, its HUD can be enhanced with exploration and combat feeds, and early on acquires the Demon Summoning Program, allowing the user to control creatures of eldritch power. The only catch is that there are no on-board weapons - you have to carry an issued gun and knife. There's nothing stopping you from later upgrading those too, though.

The idea of powered-armor-wearing shooter heroes is directly ridiculed in Duke Nukem Forever. Duke is offered some oddly familiar power armor but turns it down on the grounds that "power armor is for pussies". In fairness, since Duke can kick an alien's head off, rip open metal doors with his bare hands and survive weapon damage using the power of his ego, he hardly needs it.

Arguably, almost all armour in every RPG where characters receive bonuses other than protection (such as increase to attributes such as strength and agility)from their equipment is this. Naturally, this depends on whether items are actually enhanced or enchanted to provide benefits or it's a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation and the bonus provided is purely mechanical.

Aleste Gaiden puts protagonist Ray Waizen in a suit of high-speed combat armor which can jump 30 meters In a Single Bound and comes equipped with twin gravitational-energy swords.

In Star Wars: The Old Republic Bounty Hunters and Troopers utilize power armor to protect themselves, and also allows them to become a mobile artillery. Sith Juggernauts and Jedi Guardians also make use of such an armor, but since they are close combat specialists, it's more for their protection than anything else.

ESWAT has the I.C.E. suit, worn by police officers who graduate to the E.S.W.A.T. level.

The various MechWarrior games often feature Battle Armor, usually as annoying Cannon Fodder for your Humongous Mecha's weaponry. Mechwarrior Living Legends allows the players to use the Elemental or Longinus power armor, which can carry a pair of hand weapons ranging from flamethrowers to laser cannons, a integral back-mounted rocket launcher, and oodles of sticky explosives. Battlearmor are extremely agile courtesy of a Jump Jet Pack despite their slow running speed, allowing them to jump on enemy battlemechs and start carving the pilot out. They are the only unit capable of healing themselves on the field via an built-in Auto Doc.

In Saints Row IV The Boss pilots a suit of armor with all of their superpowers and a repulsor cannon during the final mission.

Factorio has two levels of power armor as late-game research items. Both sets of armor are extremely durable, very expensive, and highly modular. They can accept a variety of modules, such as an exoskeleton for faster movement, automated turrets, or logistic robot charging pads. However, they are limited to solar-powered battery packs until the very expensive portable fusion reactor is researched.

Bounty Hunter Solo from the Strider series is identified by wearing one of these. His armor possess jet thrusters that lets him fly at high speed, and an assortment of several deadly weapons, ranging from missiles and explosives to pure Energy Weapons.

Captain Commando uses a powered armor to fight crime. According to the Arcade flyer, his armor is split into the "Captain Protector" (a super-tough chestplate made of "Captanium" able to resist up to a trillon degree heat), "Captain Gauntlets" (which increases the Captain's strength 48 times), "Energy Gloves" (which shoots flames at 500.000 degrees and 100.000 bolts of lightning) and "Captain Boots" (which protects him from 100-meter falls)

The first unit of the Purity Affinity in Civilization: Beyond Earth is the Battlesuit power armor, in keeping with Purity's ideal units being either highly traditional Earth military forces or their updates. (For all their technology, Battlesuits are fundamentally infantry, just stronger.)

Subnautica has a possible example in the form of the Exosuit, though it counts as more of a Mini-Mecha.

Overwatch loves this trope. Pharah and Mercy both have flight-capable suits, with Pharah's also having a built in Macross Missile Massacre ability. Many other characters seem to wear high tech armor or devices that grant them special abilities. And then there's Reinhardt, a sixty-three year old giant that looks like a knight of legend and happens to have a rocket strapped to his warhammer... and mounted on his back.

Avengers Academy has Iron Man and War Machine, naturally, though they start off only wearing bits and pieces of their armour and slowly accumulate the rest of it as they rank up.

In Stellaris powered exoskeletons are a tech advance that strengthen your armies and increase mineral production (worn by miners?)

Caldarius from Battleborn wears the jet-enhanced J-HTX Assault Frame armor, a power armor that makes him look a bit like an anime mech like a Gundam. Of note, one of Caldarius' lore challenges mentions that while every J-HTX Assault Frame looks the same from the exterior, the interior of each suit though completely varies. Each suit can be heavily modified internally to accommodate the shape and biological needs of varied pilots. This includes radically sized occupants. One suit for instance featured a very small operator's cockpit, adjusted for a pilot no more than 18 inches tall. For such a pilot, the experience of controlling the HTX Assault armor would've been akin to piloting a giant war-bot.

Web Comics

XRS Though not meant to be worn as armor the XRS's thermoplastic heat resistant skin is also strong enough to defeat small calibre fire arms.

Girl Genius: This suit, while not armored, certainly does all the other things that power armor is supposed to do.

In Schlock Mercenary, Tagon's Toughs (and some other military/mercenary groups) all wear poweredclothing, which can deflect small arms fire, increase strength, offer emergency life support, and fly. And that's just their knocking-around uniform; their big hard-shelled field combat armors improve on all those abilities multiple times over and add huge shoulder-mounted cannons to boot. (Though that's the latest stage in a zigzag process; the low-profile suits were a strict upgrade from the original bulky hardshelled suits.)

Tessa and the rest of her squad of super soldiers in S.S.D.D are field-testing experimental powered armor that is controlled using Nano Machine implants as of the current arc (which is backstory), she has been seen using the armor in other story arcs that take place later (from her perspective).

Dragon Ball Multiverse: The Heliorians from U19 use them to compensate their lack of ki abilities, and they are INCREDIBLY effective.

Just like in the Metroid series, Samus has her Power Suit in Metroid: Third Derivative and it helps protect her from harm as long as Samus has Energy in her Energy Tanks. Samus can increase her suit's capabilities by collecting upgrades or scanning things in the local environment.

In Heroes Unite (and now Heroes Alliance) both Relik and SHELL. SHELL's suit is made from unobtainium (a unique meteoric crystalline material called volucite). Relik's is an alien suit that appears as a belt until activated. Arsenal and B.A.S.S. wear more 'conventional' military power armour.

These have started to show up in The Far Side Of Utopia, in particular the soldier from Kor's World seems to have a rather advanced one.

The New Vindicators universe has a few of these, being built by genius scientist and businessman Noah Meinstein to let normal people fight superhumans. The first one is the 001, also called the Portal armor because it can (among other things) create teleportals. There's also the 002, also called Deus Ex Machina, which is equipped with flamethrowers. Meinstein made a bunch more prototypes before using the 137 armor, which is mostly big bulky armor, hydraulic lifting equipment, and a powerful hammer.

The Iron Legion is an entire team of villainous Powered Armor wearers.

The GIACA from Welcometo Omega is a good example, but it's not strictly speaking power armor. It's a lot like the Venom symbiote, built into the wearer's genome and its protection based off their reaction time.

In Defection The villain, Prysim, has never been known to show herself in anything less than something capable of keeping up with the A-listers.

The armor worn by the Dimensional Guardians in the web fiction serial Dimension Heroes.

Loophole has designed and built a suit of 'Iron Man' style power armor with flight, weaponry, and spacesuit capabilities. She's about fifteen. Dynamaxx has a similar power armor suit, but he may have bought some of the components.

In a bit of a subversion, the blind devisor Jericho is working on a life-saving powered armor super-suit for EMTs and medics to wear on battlefields and in similarly dangerous spots (such as your basic superpowered hero-vs.-villain slugfest). However, since Jericho is something of a Combat Medic, his own rig includes a rather intimidating Hyperspace Arsenal, though he doesn't design the weapons himself.

In "Ayla and the Birthday Brawl" a squadron of mercenary killers, half of them in power armor, attack Ayla's friends. Since these are friends from Whateley Academy, this turns out to be a serious mistake.

Nick Klein inherited his grandfather's Powered Armor and his superhero identity, The Rocket, in Jim Zoetewey's Legion of Nothing.

Lampshaded in the blog-novel Flyover City!  crime fighting archer Sureshot is something of a joke until he dons his 90s-style cyber armor… transforming him into an even bigger joke.

"Or the Cyberarmor so after one of our troops is shot his body will keep firing guns while rock music plays".

Powered armor does appear in Darwin's Soldiers but they are intended mostly for carrying heavy cargo.

Any Machinima filmed using Halo will naturally require the presence of this trope. How much it's emphasized or played with as a part of the plot may vary.

Red vs. Blue adds specialization modules that give individual Freelancers different abilities. These can range from invisibility, to super healing, to creating a Stable Time Loop.

Soldiers in the Registry of Time universe wear suits of armor that increase strength, stamina, speed, and have built-in targeting systems.

Iron Man, War Machine, Iron Clad, Iron Cross, Captain Marvel and many others use these in Marvels RPG.

Dragon from Worm is famous for arriving at every battle in a brand-new powered-armor. Subverted in that there's no one inside the armor; she's an AI masquerading as a human superhero, and the suits of armor are the closest thing she has to physical bodies.

Defiant, as Dragon's partner, gets to wear some of her creations too.

Enter the Farside: Artifex, the resident Gadgeteer Genius, has made this his pet project. He even explains some of the pitfalls associated with having a suit of Power Armour, as well as why he can't mass produce them easily.

SCP Foundation, SCP-2461 ("Aftermath"). SCP-2461-B are exoskeletal suits of powered armor made of steel alloy and tailored to fit the individual wearer. The suits provide increased strength and life support in space, and the armor makes the wearer Immune to Bullets.

As in the comic book continuity, Lex Luthor occasionally donned a Kryptonite-powered battlesuit in the Justice League franchise. Possibly as a friendly Shout-Out to Iron Man, it was originally intended to slow the effects of a terminal heart condition (ironically the result of constantly carrying around a piece of Kryptonite).

Also ironically, it packed Kryptonite rays up the wazoo, making it quite appropriate for battling Superman.

Granny May from WordGirl has one. In addition, one episode involved the Evil Genius Dr. Two-Brains building one.

The Earth Corps scientists from Inhumanoids wore Powered Armor designed for subterranean exploration.

Xanatos had several versions: His standard suit which resembled a crimson gargoyle, the bulky iron gargoyle suit that he used to fight Oberon, and a sort of skeletized armor that basically consisted only of a chestplate, powered gauntlets, and a rocket pack.

Dingo from The Pack in the same series opted for Powered Armor rather than cybernetic upgrades or genetic manipulation like his fellow Pack members.

The three modern Hunters are also briefly seen using their own variety of Powered Armour.

Demona had powered armor in the first act of "The Reckoning".

Subverted in "Leader of the Pack": Coyote appears to be Xanatos in yet another suit of powered armor, but it turned out to be a robot.

Transformers has a few varieties. The simplest are the exo-suits worn by Spike and Daniel in Generation 1—these are modified space suits that confer protection and limited transformation ability. Headmasters and Targetmasters in the American continuity are more advanced forms, which grant improved protection and firepower as well as full transformation abilities, effectively making them one with their partners. In addition, the Autobot Pretenders in Masterforce can summon powered armour as an intermediate form between their Human and Transformers forms.

The Apex Armor from Transformers Prime functions as this for Cybertronians granting invulnerability and enhanced strength. Miko later discovers that the armor works for humans as well.

The suit from Batman Beyond originally served as an aid to keep the older Bruce Wayne in decent fighting condition, before his heart gave out. The suit was certainly sleeker then most Powered Armors, protective yet still retained a certain fabric-like dexterity. Bruce later showed a more "Iron Man"-like suit he had designed years earlier, which was more powerful and had heavier armor, but also put a lot of strain on the wearer. Of course Bruce later got to wear the suit to help Terry in a jam.

In The Batman, everyone's favorite vigilante dons a power suit similar to the larger one from Batman Beyond in order to tangle with Bane. It allows him to survive, but that's about it. He later dons a different suit to battle a Mind Controlled Superman, although it doesn't help much aside from providing a distraction.

One of the episodes of the first season had Kim Possible obtaining a power armor that got powered up by the user's stress level. Ironically, despite all the good things that came with the armor, Kim defeated Shego much easier without the armor...

She later gets a battle suit. Among its features are: defensive shields, self-repair, the ability to capture and redirect energy beams and a physical boost sufficient to let her clumsy boyfriend become a star quarterback.

Exo Squad has the "Exo Frames", usually called "E-Frames", which are basically Power Loaders with guns, armor and a flight system bolted on, in addition to the occasional Giant Mecha (one of the Terran examples even has a hangar bay for launching E-Frames) and the lighter Powered Armor worn by the Jump Troopers.

The Monarch and his Deaths-Head Panoply from The Venture Bros.. Subverted in that it isn't actually powered. Its just a solid, unmoving suit that fires missiles and rockets about. He can't even move his arms. However this is due to design flaws that haven't been worked out yet.

In season five, Hank appropriates the "strength suit" of the former Countess of SPHINX, and it really does live up to the awesome potential of this trope. It's also pure fanservice in the "improbably molded metal" tradition, but it looks like Hank is hanging on to it regardless.

In "Gangland", an episode of The Spectacular Spider-Man, Silvermane shows off his powered armor, which inexplicably doesn't cover his face. It's the kind of powered armor that hums and whirs with every movement, and the noise tips Spidey off about how to defeat him.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) villains Baxter Stockman and Darius Dun use these when they want to get offensive. The Shredder also takes to these when he wants a power boost, although, given his Utrom-y nature, those may actually count as Humongous Mecha.

Buzz Lightyear of Star Command established that Star Command spacesuits were power armor. Would've justified the toy's clunky appearance... except the animation style made the suit sleeker.

The CGI spin-off series of the Starship Troopers film series, Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles does feature powered armour, unlike the first two films. The troopers' standard suits are powered and provide some degree of strength enhancement, and they also use larger, more mecha-like suits called Marauders, typically 1-2 per squad of troopers. The Marauders are highly impressive until their limited battery life expires, at which point the occupant becomes "canned lunchmeat".

Sym-Bionic Titan: Although they resemble mechs, the armor Lance and Ilana use (Manus and Corus, respectively) fit this more. There are/were many more Manus armor back on Galaluna.

A bulky powered armour is standard equipment for the Enforcers in Phantom 2040.

Real Life

Believe it or not, it's coming, and getting increasingly advanced. Utah-based company Sarcos has already developed a functional powered exoskeleton called "XOS" that increases the strength of the wearer significantly. As one person put it, "From enough grace to gently play ball, to enough super-power to load a missile on an aircraft". And indeed, from the footage, it seems surprisingly mobile. The main problems being that A) Currently, it doesn't have the covering to act as armor, but they fully intend to add an outer shell when the kinks are worked out. And B) they're still working out how to power it as a self-contained unit. The scary part? Sarcos has been bought up by the major defense contractor Raytheon (they make a lot of US military equipment, particularly missiles), meaning we may be seeing elite soldiers in these things by the 2020s. Indeed, the US Army already field tested it in 2009, and by 2010 Raytheon had developed an improved version named XOS 2, which can be seen in action here.

According to Scientific American, Raytheon plans to introduce a tethered version of their suit for operational logistics and loading/unloading in 2015, and an untethered version 3-5 years after that. The logistical problem with the untethered suit is building in a power supply that won't run out in less than an hour. But with recent advances in battery technology, that shouldn't be an issue for much longer.

Similarly to the above example, spacesuits used for EVA (extravehicular activity) are basically tiny spacecraft in the shape of a flexible suit, used for manual work outside in the vacuum of space. While the current US spacesuit, the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU), remains more similar to clothing (in that you have to gradually put it on and off piece by piece), its Russian counterpart, the Orlan, is entered simply via opening a door in its back◊, entering and having someone close the door behind you. This technically makes the Orlan slightly closer in feel and design to a stereotypical Science Fiction suit of Powered Armor.

And the US equivalent, the ARX-3 developed during the Strategic Defense Initiative days. Not for fighting Soviet Space Marines, but for servicing space-based weapons in a polar orbit (meaning a higher exposure to radiation) and for sabotaging Soviet satellites (which were believed to use corrosive fuels that would eat through the fabric-type suits) all requiring a hard-shell spacesuit.

The company's first product was actually an unpowered load-bearing exoskeleton originally offered to a Russian MoD exactly to allow the weight of the protection equipment (such as a body armor or a Hazmat Suit) that the soldier could wear, but it was met with only a limited interest, which has prompted the company to switch to a powered design and a medical application to raise more funds for the development, as they were essentially told to came back when they'd have more than that. In fact, that still have only a lower body support and an open-loop computerized remote control, instead of a fancier brainwave or muscle potential inputs, though they are working on it.

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